I know the title sounds a little fancy, but basically it just means that you construct your character out of basic geometric shapes, like cir- cles, ovals, cylinders, and occasionally rectangles (use these
sparingly). You’re even allowed to use fruit and other yummy shapes like oranges, pears, cashews, and cucumbers.
Again, we come back to the reason why we use these geomet- ric shapes.
First of all, they’re easy to animate. Remember, you’re going to be doing a lot of drawings on these characters… and I do mean a lot. So right away, you’d better decide to make your character relatively easy to draw by constructing it out of shapes that are easy to draw
repeatedly.
You also have to be able to turn these characters in space, and a character that’s built out of a series of circles and maybe a pear is going to be much more easily drawn from different angles. Also don’t forget that (depending on the style in which you’re working)
this character is going to be pushed and pulled around by outside forces, and squashed and stretched by gravity. Once again, far eas- ier to accomplish with basic geometric shapes.
A final reason for basing your character construction on geo- metric shapes is visual appeal.
It has been noted that the appeal of Disney’s most famous mouse is that he’s built out of circles. A circle has been called the most geometrically perfect shape, and perhaps that is why Mickey has been such a success with generation after generation of fans.
Now that you’ve hopefully settled on the third (and I truly con- sider it the only viable) method, let’s start with the most obvious feature of a character: the head.
I like to draw a character in what’s called the 3/4 view. Obvi- ously drawing a character in profile is not something you want to do in every single shot. Drawing directly in a frontal view is better than profile, but if you turn the character roughly halfway between a profile and frontal view, you’ve got the 3/4 view.
As I mentioned earlier, we know very well that we’re drawing two-dimensional characters, but we’re always trying to give that illusion of the third dimension.
Drawing your character in the 3/4 view is probably the most important step in achieving that illusion.
Start out with a circle. To ensure that I’m drawing the character in that 3/4 view, I like to place these little perspective “guidelines” on the face. One that goes directly down the center of the face, between the eyes, and all the way around the back of the head back to where we started. The other guide will run perpendicular to the first line you drew, crossing the former right around the nose and at the very back of the head.
If you’re working with a #2 pencil, you can erase these guides later. If you’re working with the light blue Col-Erase pencil as I suggested, you don’t even have to worry about erasing. Should the character turn out well enough so that you wish to ink him, and either scan or photocopy later, the blue lines will naturally disap- pear in reproduction.
You’ll probably want to place the eyes sitting on that second guideline we created. Since we’re drawing in 3/4 view, notice that perspective dictates that we need to make the character’s eye, the one farther away from us, slightly smaller than the eye closer to us.
If you don’t believe me, try drawing them the same size. Sud- denly the eye farther away looks bigger than the one that is close (see the figure at the upper left on the following page), even though we know we’ve drawn them the same size. I have to “cheat” a bit and make the far eye smaller to give the eyes the illusion of being “the same size” (see the figure at the upper right).
The laws of perspective sure are weird, huh?
Okay, depending on the particular features of your character, go ahead and fill those in either according to the example on the fol- lowing page, or use details of your own choosing. Here, we’re using a sort of traditional 1940s animated character, but of course, style will vary according to your personal taste. You’ve got to start some- where, and this is as good a style to start with as any.
As you start to flesh out the rest of your character, you’re going to start to ask yourself questions: What kind of character is this? Tall, short, skinny, fat, or muscular? How old is he or she? Is the character generally a happy individual, or angry, maybe even sul- len? What time frame is this character from? Is this a well-to-do, zoot-suited party player from the 1940s, or is he a peasant from the Dark Ages? Obviously, costume is going to play a role here as well in determining your character, so these are all questions you’d better be prepared to answer.
When I was drawing characters back in high school, I found myself making up stories about them that practically wrote themselves.
For instance, that’s the Gargoyle. If you just look at him once, he looks like something that hopped off a ledge from the Notre Dame cathedral. But at second glance, he’s actually a party ani- mal… he’s got a weakness for being a ladies’ man (or a ladies’… well, whatever) and making wisecracks at inappropriate times. He’s a practical joker, and if his “boss,” The Dark, were to tell it, the somber overlord would describe the Gargoyle as something between a flying bodyguard, tomcat, and court jester all rolled into one.
Do the same thing for your character. Give him a back story. How did this guy become the Gargoyle, for instance? He used to be a typical teenager named Marty at an Alabama high school back in 1986. Then his best friend Mark Johnson found a magical amulet (a sinister talisman from a forgotten North American civilization), a fearsome metallic basilisk with ruby eyes, coiled into the shape of an ampersand (the “&” symbol) turned on its side. Marty wished he could be a shapeshifter, and now the gray-green gargoyle is his favorite form of choice.
Easy, huh?
Now back to our little generic 1940s character. We’ll give him those thin arms common to the era, as well as those little white gloves. Why do they all wear little white gloves? Good question. I always figured it was to help conceal the fact that they only had a thumb and three fingers, as opposed to our four fingers and a thumb. The reason this is done (most likely) is to reduce the work for the animators. If you think about it, since there are 24 frames per second for film, and 30 frames per second for video, and you’ve got to do a drawing for each one of those frames (as long as the character isn’t standing perfectly still), you start to see why very early in the animation industry, people began to look for shortcuts to speed up their work process.
If you figure drawing one less finger on one hand would be 24 less fingers you’d have to draw per second of film, then double that for the other hand, that’s 48 less fingers you have to draw… again, per second! (Multiply that out across 60 seconds per minute in a six-minute cartoon, or even a 75-minute animated feature!)
Right away, I hope this helps you appreciate one of the most important aspects of character design… simplicity!
When I was at the Animation MasterClass, Dick was taking questions, and I was still fairly new to animation (only seven years to his thirty-plus), so I thought, “How can I come up with a good, sensible question? Well, I got my degree in graphic design, so I suppose I’ll ask him a design question.”
“Dick,” I asked, after he pointed to my raised hand. “What’s your favorite character you’ve worked on from a design
“I’d have to say the Thief, from The Thief and The Cobbler, just because he has such a simple design.” Since that comes from a bona-fide animation genius, I’d say that was a pretty darn good answer.
I’d have to say as a comparison, about the same time Batman
the Animated Series came out, a new X-Men cartoon came out. With
Batman, they came up with a terrific “look” that had the characters simplified to a level of streamlined simplicity so the artists could focus less on “drawing all those little detail lines” you see in the comic book, and could channel their creative energies onto giving the characters a better performance in fluid motion.
On the X-Men, they tried to go with the look of “drawing all those little detail lines” and attempting to get the characters as close to their original comic book designs as possible. While doing so, they had to focus on “all those little detail lines” rather than the fluid performance of the character, and they ended up being
stiff-limbed and kinda clunky-moving.
I really need to mention this here as we approach drawing your first model sheet, because this book’s goal, as you recall, is to teach you to import your drawings into Flash. Not only will a simple char- acter be easier to animate with fewer lines, but it will honestly download faster and move faster with fewer lines.
So please do keep that in mind as you’re designing your character.
Legs on our typical 1940s character aren’t too different from his arms, relatively thin, but perhaps just a bit longer than the arms. Feet are kept simple, like the rest of the character, and we’ll leave him barefooted for no particular reason. Notice we can get away with giving him even fewer toes than he has fingers. If you don’t believe me, count how many toes Fred Flintstone has. Three! You think I’m kidding? Count them and see.
With our first character drawing done, now we need to take this a little bit further and do at least two more drawings from the basic angles: 3/4 view (which you hopefully just completed), profile, and back view. You may want to do a full frontal view, just to even things out.
When drawing a model sheet, it’s best to draw all your views of the character at the same size, and standing on the same horizontal line. Many studios even place what I call a “head ruler” across the sheet, just to show how many “heads high” a character is. That’s a further precaution that helps you keep the proportions consistent on the character, regardless of whether you’re a one-man independ- ent animation crew, or have a staff of hundreds that will all be drawing the same character. (Naturally, you’ll soon discover how many assistants you have depends on how many zeros are in your animation production budget.)
You may wish to add to your model sheet, depending on the size of your sheet of paper, the character in various moods, atti- tudes, and positions. Facial expressions are handy to include.
What you’ll also quickly realize is that it’s unlikely you’ll get any of these drawings right the first time; that’s perfectly all right. For now, you’re in an exploratory process to develop a character that, if properly drawn, can enthrall hundreds, thousands, or per- haps even millions of happy viewers.
An early Jayle Bat model sheet. Note the “head ruler” behind Jayle, which indicates she’s roughly 4½ heads tall. A model sheet should include a turnaround, preferably with front, back, and side views of the character. It should also show the character in various attitudes of happy, frightened, bored, angry, and any other emotions she’s likely to run through during your cartoon.
It’s kind of interesting to see how Jayle has developed over the past 10 years. Oddly enough, the “frightened” image still looks most like how I currently envision the character.
(A) If you have two characters, it may be best to use contrast to your advan- tage. Even though Laurel and Hardy dressed almost identically, the con- trast between thick and thin made them visually amusing to look at. (B) Variations. When developing a character, don’t be too quick to choose your first drawing. Experiment with those anatomical proportions! See how many variations you can get, starting with the same shapes (circles) and the same ingredients (1930s bulb-nose, gloves, hair).
(C) See what I would’ve been stuck with if I’d stopped at any of my first three drawings of Jayle?